


headaches have the same feeling as the taste of vodka

by ithurtsbecauseitmattered



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: F/M, and thought about maggie's hair too much, i watched the finale and then started rewatching the series, this is the life i lead kids, this is total lunacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 03:10:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2797418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ithurtsbecauseitmattered/pseuds/ithurtsbecauseitmattered
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Harper should spend less time staring at his co-worker from across the rows of desks, but it's really hard to resist the odd glance. Or fifteen.<br/>Set somewhere in Series 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	headaches have the same feeling as the taste of vodka

All he can think about when he looks across the newsroom is her hair. Okay, so maybe this is more specifically, the closed eyed, beating kiss that they'd shared that crisp New York City night, and the role her hair had played in that moment for him, which sounds weirder than he cares to admit in his own head, but it's marginally less weird than the fixed way he's watching her work, which he knows would make the back of her neck blush and the corners of her lips turn down, and the idea of that is enough to make his stomach turn, so he'll take what he can.

He remembers the way she shivered when she stood on the sidewalk, the water that had collected in the road showered over her by that stupid Sex in the City tour bus, a last ditch effort to learn more about Lisa but mostly so Maggie would smile at him and maybe touch his shoulder and whisper that he was a good boyfriend. Being with Lisa was maybe a mistake, and maybe he wished he'd set her straight and not just dated her out of sheer awkwardness and maybe all this would have the capacity to be much simpler right now. Maybe he'd be with Maggie or he'd know that she didn't want him. He was dumb and it was selfish and what a totally horrible thing to do, but it was as true as anything was going to get so he might as well face it now. He wanted to make her happy, and he thought maybe her friends happiness could do that in some stupid, warped way. He wasn't a planner or very good with his timing, but he knew how to really spin out and dedicate yourself to what is basically a big lie. And then he remembers heavy breathing and _racing_ in his heartbeat and in his feet and the desperation to just get to the point where he could understand what the hell had just happened, running away and then to the epicenter of the explosions that were currently pinging around his fried brain, with her disheveled state and then every single second of blurry intimacy after that. Admittedly it's not much, but it's enough to keep him up at night. Enough that he replays it when he's watching TV or eating his breakfast or brushing his teeth. And every moment in between. He remembers that her skin was soft and very cold, the way she'd stood on her tiptoes when he'd closed the distance even when her eyes were so deeply nervous, like the warring parts of her body were all swept up but still trying to behave, to not betray her best friend and the boyfriend she'd had for over a year, but then he's kissing her and this isn't the weirdly detached kisses he gave to Lisa, or even the ones he's getting from Hallie which he could class as affectionate or something, but it's nothing compared to the massive rocket blasting hole Maggie Jordan left in him when she'd touched their lips together. It was enough to make him hate himself really. She was a good kisser and they had chemistry that could burn down the whole ACN building. There's always a part of him thinking about it, whether it's just as quiet as a pen tapping against a desk, or enough to pull him out of sleep in a hot sweat with his fingers balling into his sheets, imagining that it's her hair.

He'd spent too long in that ten foot space away from here. He'd been her friend in those ten feet, he'd brought her coffee and smiled at her and she'd rolled her eyes to suppress grins and been a fantastic journalist and made his heart stop like twenty times a day. And she's absently curled hair round her fingers when she's been working too hard and for too long, shook her hair out and behind her shoulders with her eyes lazily half shut and her arms stretching upwards in her rare slower moments, pulled it up and stuck pens into it and turned around in flashes of anger that make it swish everywhere. And the one or two times she's got so excited and bouncy about a news broadcast or a call she's made and he's been the only person there and her smile is making him melt, she's hugged him and he's very carefully stroked the ends of her hair, pressed his face into her head and inhaled as quietly as he can. He's gently pushed her hair aside to feel her pulse when she panicked on the roof, and he's ever so gently pulled his fingers through it when he kissed her on that slickly hopeful night. He'd been so... obsessed with not letting people down. Kissing her more would lead to her telling Lisa, which would lead to their friendship being split into pieces, or Don's shell shocked face of disappointment. Maggie didn't deserve to deal with that, and even how quiet her voice got couldn't stop that shaking in his stomach. James Harper was not a coward. He had faced far scary things than this, things like gunfire and the constant threat of death. But something about the pain of being physically shot was a little more pleasant than walking away from her and trying to piece something resembling his life back together.

Blonde was the colour of her hair and not some unholy promise that she'd laid against his fingers. He got that. There was nothing special about hair colours, he'd met hundreds of blonde women who did nothing to inspire him the way Maggie did. And it wasn't her hair that made him love her - because if we're being entirely honest, James Harper did very little else but love her - it was her. The things she said and the way she said them, how smart she was, the way she could rip him to shreds within a moment and raise her eyebrows at him in disbelief. How she could tip her head back to hide tears that made him want to wrap her up so she never cried again or felt pain again. The way she got animated when she talked about something she was passionate about, the way she fully lit up all the way into her toes. Her brain, her heart, her sense of right and wrong all drew him to her. But that was hard to keep focused on, so he settled for thinking about her hair most of the time. That pretty, almost white yellow that he looked into and saw colours he didn't even know existed before. 

Which meant that right now it was getting a little harder for him. Not much, just a small fraction, because he couldn't just pass this off as easily as he had prior. This situation could be a brush with colour, but now it was a full blown war against everything because her hair was gone and he was still staring at her. He actually kind of liked it short and dark. He could see her eyes better, see the moody way they flicked about sometimes, see them dance just the smallest bit, a reminder that not all of her fighting spirit had been drained from her. But his... attraction (what a nice safe word that just meant that sometimes he thought about being a country house and settling down in their old age which was totally normal and not at all creepy) to her was not a hair thing. It was not because she was that wholesome, smiley Midwestern girl that he'd guessed might be some kind of type of his, because the Maggie sitting across the room was maybe still Midwestern but she was not wholesome. Her whole face was lit and shadowed in the dancing light of the computer screen, angles that he'd never noticed before being newly illuminated, and his heart was sinking as he failed to look away.

Cough. Splutter. Google search: how to stop loving someone who you never really dated even though you totally might have been able to if you weren't a complete loser screw up and her hair cut which is kind of a sad hair cut has made you love her more.

Things were messy.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic I've written since the Summer as I broke up for Christmas today, so be gentle! Leave a review if you want to give me some feedback <33


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